Hi,
I am the founder of Omnimaga (2001) and CodeWalrus (2014) and author of various past calculator programs (mostly RPGs). I stepped down from my Omnimaga admin position in 2011 and remained active as news editor until around a few months ago. In the meantime, I was also active on Cemetech on and off, as well as CodeWalrus afterward.
Unfortunately, after recommendations from friends due to issues mentionned in this post last march (this version is a cross-post, but modified), I was forced to announce my goodbye from SAX (#Cemetech IRC channel) and the entire Omnimaga website. I am afraid that it's now Telegram's turn. I originally left WalrusIRC and IRC as well a few days ago, but I figured out a way to set users on /ignore, thanks to Streetwalrus. As a result, from now on, all my activity will be only on CodeWalrus forums, WalrusIRC and to a lesser extent some other forums like Cemetech/TI-Planet/Revsoft. But no more real-time chat mediums. UPDATE: IRC has an ignore feature as well, but it's not the most ideal place for me to chat, due to high risks of unwanted private messages and being unable to temporarily ignore specific WalrusIRC users during hard times. Telegram... well... it doesn't even have a banning feature for staff and people can invite others to random groups at will without their permission, so I'll only use it to chat with certain people privately now. To ignore people on WalrusIRC, Streetwalrus directed me to Stylish extension after he edited the CSS of the shoutbox.
My issues to communicate properly have plagued my experience and the experience of others in the community when I was around, with misunderstandings and disputes. While a few were intentionally caused by some community members, I have troubles with working out people's intention that I never got able to overcome, thanks in part to several bad experiences in the past (a lot in real life). Unfortunately, those issues are not related to text being a poor communication medium nor language barrier, because I have the same problem when communicating in my native language via voice mediums, so it caused me problems in real life too in the past.
This, along with many other things I noticed about myself over the years, led to the conclusion that I have asperger syndrome. It is not officially diagnosticed but many people that I know have it and I have every single symptom to a certain degree). I also always had serious problems adapting to changes (an example being switching from BASIC to Axe/ASM/C) and why, 8 years after moving to my own appartment, I am barely able to adapt to the extra life duties that come with it.
It was wrong from me and the others people to continuously tell admins of other sites to run things the way we want, because they are not our sites. Normally we either deal with it, go elsewhere or start our own place. Unfortunately, I was unable to adapt to Cemetech nor the change in direction that Omnimaga took in recent years, and since it was the case of other people as well, the last option was chosen. It was not intended as an attack towards other sites, but rather to make the community more diverse (all 3 sites had different mentalities, good sides and negative sides). But no matter what, I am sorry to have bothered Omni, Cemetech and other site admins non-stop in the past to have things ran differently.
My problems do not limit themselves to my communication and changes issues, however, unless the rest is caused by those two issues. I started becoming into a somewhat depressive mood starting in early October or so, which worsened ever since. In addition to that, my sensitivity is another thing I have never been able to overcome, and seeing a psy in 2010 didn't help, as he pretty much told me the exact same things that close friends at the time told me. Also, when a bad incident affects me, sometimes, I will keep bad memories of it forever, even if later I become in good terms with the people involved. If I see them again later, those bad memories come back and I start feeling down. So the solution was to avoid being around those people (which can be a problem in real life but so far it hasn't happened with immediate acquintances there).
I am not sure how we will stay in touch after this post, although since I am remaining active on the forums, that could be an alternative. That said, I alienated many people in the past, if not recently, with my behavior, and you did not deserve any backlash from my part (ok, some people did, but not everyone have bad intentions). This made it next to impossible for me to keep a friendship intact. So my departure might be for the best. Sorry for those I have hurt and maybe, one day, I can come back. I'll be on the forums only, now. (On Cemetech, I use Adblock to disable SAX, while on CW, I joined the No-shoutbox usergroup to disable WalrusIRC)
-Kevin Ouellet, alias DJ Omnimaga
